Mount Sinai
Interesting facts
- The steep direct route to the summit, the Steps of Penitence, climbs some 3,750 rough stone steps up the ravine behind Saint Catherine's Monastery.
- The small chapel on the summit dates from 1934 and stands on the ruins of a 16th-century church; a small mosque shares the peak beside it.
- The monastery once held the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th-century manuscript that is the oldest almost complete Bible, removed by Constantin von Tischendorf in 1844 and 1859.
- The monastery's collection includes the oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator, one of a few icons that may date back to the 6th century.
- Inside the monastery walls stands a Fatimid mosque built in 1106, sharing the compound with the Byzantine basilica.
- The roof of the monastery church rests on a king-post truss that is the oldest known surviving roof truss in the world.
- Imaging work on the monastery's palimpsests has identified more than 160 erased manuscripts and recovered over 6,800 pages of hidden text.
- According to tradition, a bramble growing in the monastery grounds is the very Burning Bush from which God spoke to Moses.
- Next door rises Mount Catherine, 2,629 metres high and the tallest peak in Egypt, overtopping the mountain of Moses by more than 300 metres.
- The mountain is built of alkaline granites that forced their way into older rocks, which gives the summit area its bare red-brown faces.
Why it is worth it
Three religions independently point at the same mountain. Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition all place the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on this peak — known locally as Jabal Musa, "Mountain of Moses" — making it one of the very few places on Earth where the core narratives of all three Abrahamic faiths physically converge rather than just overlap thematically.
That convergence produced something concrete at the mountain's base: Saint Catherine's Monastery, founded around 530 CE on the order of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. It has operated continuously since then, which makes it the oldest continuously functioning monastic community anywhere in the world — nearly 1,500 years without a break long enough to count as a refounding. The monks kept more than a religious routine running; the monastery also holds the oldest continuously operating library on Earth, with over 3,300 manuscripts in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Slavonic and other languages, covering theology alongside medicine, philosophy and astronomy.
At 2,285 metres, the summit is not exceptional by mountaineering standards — it is the accumulated weight of who has climbed it, and why, that makes the mountain matter. Pilgrims have been making the ascent for centuries, and the peak remains an active pilgrimage destination for all three faiths today rather than a historical curiosity kept alive only for visitors.
Getting there
48 km from El-Tor. Sharm El Sheikh International Airport (SSH) is about 75 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Saint Catherine's Monastery 1.9 km · monastery
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From the encyclopaedia
Mount Sinai, also known as Jabal Musa, is a mountain on the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. It is one of several locations claimed to be the biblical Mount Sinai, the place where, according to the sacred scriptures of the three major Abrahamic religions, the Hebrew prophet Moses received the Ten Commandments from God.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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